'What kind of fuck you give me?'
Downsizing, an ambitious Alexander Payne flick that nobody’s seen, capped my weekend
“What kind of fuck you give me?”
The character played by the inestimable Hong Chau asks this question of Matt Damon, emphatically, during the third and final act of Downsizing, an Alexander Payne film that on Sunday I caught for a second time.
The entire movie hinges on Damon’s response.
Martin Castro on Unsplash
This 2017 film anchored the Payne film festival that played on my laptop over this weekend. The dive started after a podcast conversation about great campaign movies brought up Election, Payne’s perfect dark comedy. I’d seen that 1999 film twice and been more delighted on the second occasion than I was through the first viewing.
And that first screening slayed me.
The Election mention took me spelunking into the Kanopy app. Downsizing was in the Kanopy library, but so too was Nebraska, the Payne film I recall enjoying least.
The Midwestern landscape that this pair traverses is decaying, cash poor, and waiting for Trumpism to get born.
Nebraska turns out to be an excellent film—the rare black-and-white 21st-century feature—and way, way more engaging than I had remembered. As with Election and Downsizing, the protagonist is an unfulfilled White man with a spiritually connection to a certain flat and landlocked state.
Payne hails from Omaha, and throughout my own personal laptop festival his quietly yearning Nebraskans gave me distinctly different narrative experiences.
Election exists as sheer satire. Surgically, the writer-director’s adaptation of a Tom Perrota novel skewers Mathew Broderick’s covertly vindictive high school teacher. His foil—go-gettin’ class president Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon)—is an annoying kid, but as a child it’s her job to be imperfect. The wacky joke here is on the grownup and the resentments that make him small.
Nebraska (2013) has a far different pace from the MTV Films-produced Election. Will Forte’s mission with a distant, demented father (Bruce Dern) has him moseying from Montana in search of a paternal payday that’s 90 percent mirage. The Midwestern landscape that this pair traverses is decaying, cash poor, and waiting for Trumpism to get born. More than most of Payne comedy, the melancholy is far above the surface.
I probably liked Downsizing so much because it it’s so much bigger than Nebraska and everything he made prior. Downsizing’s a vast film about getting small, and a lot of people might consider the production this director’s biggest misfire. (Sideways, About Schmidt, and The Holdovers are Payne’s most lauded.)
The movie happens in a world where humans can elect to be made miniature, both to save the planet and to improve one’s financial living standard. Damon’s Paul finds himself alone and dissatisfied, even in his new world, until he meets Chau’s Ngoc Lan, a poor Vietnamese activist who was made small against her will. Ngoc Lan hobbles across the tiny new frontier sans one foot, hobbling with epic dignity and gusto.
Chau’s scenes with Damon are electric and underscore Payne’s point that a whitebread life can quietly do you in. The line that is the title of this post comes as Paul is about to choose the prospect of a paradoxically-empty happiness—one that happens to exist beneath the Earth—over the connection he has just established with Chau/Ngoc Lan.
With only hours left before the anticipated separation, the activist calls her new lover aside:
NGOC LAN: I ask you question. You say me truth. Okay? (He nods) Other night on boat... what kind of fuck you give me?
PAUL: What?
NGOC LAN: What kind of fuck you give me?
PAUL: What kind? I don’t... I have no idea what you’re talking about.
NGOC LAN: American peoples, eight kind of fuck. (counting on fingers) Love fuck, hate fuck, sex-only fuck, break-up make-up fuck, buddy fuck, drunk fuck, pity fuck.
PAUL: Look, I don’t know where you heard that, but --
NGOC LAN: Third host family.
PAUL: That’s just stupid. There’s a whole spectrum of... emotions and... motivations. And you shouldn’t say “fuck.” It’s vulgar. Say “make love” or something. I don’t know.
A smile comes across NGOC Lan’s face.
NGOC LAN: So... was love fuck?
PAUL: No, I mean... What’s this all about?
NGOC LAN: You look for me, you want help me, you make fuck with me, now you go down stupid hole. So I try to think what kind fuck you give me. I think maybe pity fuck. For leg.
PAUL: No, no, Ngoc Lan, I care about you deeply. You are an extraordinary human being, and I admire you so much. More than anything I want you to come with me.
NGOC LAN: Peoples always say me I strong. (Tears up) Okay, maybe Vietnam I organize many protest, survive two year prison and punish me make small. I only person survive TV box, everybody die. I walk around no foot, take care for other peoples. But I woman. Feelings.
PAUL: I’m sorry. I really am. It’s so easy for me to see who you are. But if I don’t do this, who am I? I mean, really. Who am I?
NGOC LAN: You Paul Safranek. You good man!
As with most Payne characters, Ngoc Lan is extremely well-written. Chau elevates the words to a rarified cinematic place. I cannot tell you the choice Damon made, but I can tell you that theatrical audiences did not fuck with this film.
Historically, Downsizing gets labeled as the start of Payne’s down period, probably because it so diverges from his past. I can’t ever view this film that way. It stretches out and asks the biggest questions, about growth. It gives the right kind of fuck.
Overserved?
Tip your journalist on the way out.